PROBLEMS IN FORESTRY EDUCATION 645 



readily convince any one that a person with a purely engineering train- 

 ing is absolutely lacking in any basic knowledge of wood. A broad 

 understanding of these problems requires a properly correlated knowl- 

 edge of both forestry and engineering, and unless thoroughly correlated 

 cannot be wholly efficient. Of course, in the distant past the Service 

 has not been to blame for such a condition, but it is not wholly free 

 from criticism for allowing such a condition to persist. A very few of 

 the schools have recognized the difficulty, and have tried to remedy it 

 by enabling the student to take a combined course of training in for- 

 estry and engineering, calculated to give the Service men with a foun- 

 dation such that they might reasonably be expected to develop into the 

 exact type needed. But instead of recognizing the effort these schools 

 are making, the Service persistently states in its announcements of 

 civil-service examinations in the majority of lines in forest products 

 that applicants must be graduates in cifil, mechanical, or chemical engi- 

 neering, as the case may be, thus at the outset denying the forest-school 

 graduate even an opportunity of showing what he can do. 



The writer knows of specific cases where engineers were trying to 

 deal with problems involving a thorough knowledge of the structure of 

 wood who didn't know the difference between a tracheid and medullary 

 ray. This state of affairs has occasionally led to utterly ridiculous 

 statements. Fortunately such statements are usually caught before 

 they appear in print. Yet, since practically all questions in forest prod- 

 ucts involve a thorough knowledge of the structure and the physical 

 qualities of wood, it certainly seems that we have been overlooking 

 something in the preparation and the selection of men for these lines 

 of work, and that the forest schools that are making an effort to give 

 their students the proper combined training in forestry and engineering, 

 forestry and chemistry, or whatever the particular case may call for, 

 are not being given the proper consideration. Experience at the Uni- 

 versity of Washington shows that it is quite possible in a five-year 

 course to give students an amply sufficient training in such a combina- 

 tion of subjects and to correlate them in a way to make the students 

 efficient and successful workers. 



Coming back, now, to the legitimate field of the forest school, I should 

 say that it includes the work in lumbering, logging engineering, wood 

 preservation, timber inspection; in fact, all phases of the work in forest 

 production, forest management, forest engineering, and forest utiliza- 

 tion, even to the point of certain specialized work in marketing. It is 

 true that we have been giving at least a smattering of all this work. 

 However, the fields of work our graduates have entered show beyond 



